You can see photos from yesterday here.

Hey, Thorf, I know it's a little late - but do you think you can thumbnail the really big maps from now on as is done in the new "Hand Drawn Maps" thread? I find it much easier to navigate.

I read your explanation the other night, and was already considering revising the thread with that code.

One question: is that just a feature of bulletin board code or is it in HTML proper too? I don't have time to experiment myself right now.

It's a service provided by ImageShack.us - every time you upload an image to them, it creates a thumbnail and then prints out addresses for both the thumbnailed and fullsized versions that you can cut and paste into a bb post. It's pretty easy to use - the only complication is that it gives you a couple of different URL formats for different types of bulletin board, and you have to pick the right one.

I know you're busy - congrats, by the way! - so I won't feel bad if you don't run out and update.

Thorf- Love the maps! Hope you're the new canon mapper. Any chance of any of these? (Just wondering if they're in your plans... no pressure!)

The WotI map of Alphatian Neatherum (from the 2d book in the box)?
GAZ14 Atraughin
GAZ15 DotE
HWR1 Azcan
HWR2 Nithia (both sides of N-S 8m poster map?)
HWR3 Milenia
HWA1 (Glantri near the tunnel?)
HWA2 Ashmorain (floating island)
HWA3 Shajapur
X11 Wendar/Denagoth (like you did w/Norwold?)
TM1/2?
Geoff Gander's DAVANIA maps from the late 90's? (c. 1997-98?)
Geoff Gander's WENDAR/DENAGOTH maps, same era?
Geoff Gander's Hollow World map of one of the other islands--I'm forgetting the name--I think he put a Carnifex empire there
Geoff Gander's Heldannic Freeholds/Territories map, same era?

Thanks! The maps look great & congrats on your marriage.

Haldemar

Thorf already has thumbnails on his own website. I'm betting he'll just use his own webspace if he thumbnails the current images.

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Mystara in 3D VRML <-- Updated with screenshots. Thanks Shawn!

Oh, well in that case... Just say "[ url = /path/to/fullsize.img ][ img ] /path/to/thumbnail.img [ /img ] [ /url ]" - that embeds the thumbnail as an image, and makes the image a link to the fullsize one.

I think you'll find the Atruaghin map has already been done.

I too was hoping for the HWR1 Azcan map, as the ESD only has the legend (go figure! ), but I've just won the bid for a copy on ebay, so that map isn't so urgent now (for me, anyway! ).

BTW, nice photos Thorf. I was trying to view them on dial-up over the weekend and gave up, but now I'm at work I can view them properly.

Congratulations!

I'd like to see all the maps listed by Haldemar too. Just for your own info, the Davania, Heldann, and Denagoth maps were created around the same time (1996-1998). My Hollow World map is of the Empire of Selhomarr, a human nation I developed some time ago, on the continent of Suridal.

I'd like to add my congratulations for you, too, Thorf!

I'm new here, but highly impressed by your maps, Thorf. They really are both beautiful and useful.

From reading through the thread, I noticed that it sounds like you don't have the fold-out maps from the Red Steel and Savage Baronies box sets. I happen to have both and am not using them currently. Thus, I would be happy to loan them to you if that would help you in mapping those areas. My only stipulation would be that you return them when you're done mapping those areas. If this is of any interest to you, please contact me by email.

BTW, congrats to you and your lovely new bride!

Gordon (happily married old guy)

My oh my! Thorf! YOU'RE IN GREAT SHAPE! I wouldn't have recognized you!
My compliments for the Japanese diet you followed in the last years, you look even taller than what I remembered

And that Orkneys t-shirt below the shirt is just pure Orkney pride !

My greatest compliments, you both look fine, happy and in good shape, so what do you want more?
Oh, your father looks radiant too, and your wife has a wonderful smile... but tell me, does she have some Thai blood? Her complexion seems way too dark to be pure Japanese..

I confess I am in great commotion...
Many many wishes and enjoy your honeymoon!

Hope you won't take trains in Japan now, after what happened yesterday

Chiming in a bit late, but had to say the maps are excellent.

One thing that draws me back to Known World (I never took a shining to the "M word" ) is the mapping style. Playing in other settings, namely Greyhawk, I can't help but feel that the "prettier" the official maps get, the more useless they get in play. I don't want to have to get out a ruler and compass to figure out distances and such when looking at a map, and I could care less about scientifically accurate global curvatures. Give me some old school hex maps anyday. And these are top notch.

Great work Thorf!

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- chatdemon
demon@keepontheinternet.com
Bree-Yark, Baby!

Congradulations, Thorf! Thanks for sharing the pictures!

All the best to you and your wife!

First, apologies for my inability to reply for the last few weeks.

We had our wedding yesterday. It was a blur, but a bit success by all accounts. My father, the only person from back home who could make it out here to Japan, took hundreds of photographs. I felt even luckier than usual to have a professional photographer for a father. Anyway, as promised, you can see some pictures here.

Thanks to everyone who left messages for us over the past few weeks. My wife Kika and I really appreciated them.

So, now everything is over, and my father leaves on Thursday morning. We won't be honeymooning until next year, so life is going back to normal frighteningly fast. Kika even had work today, and I have my usual work starting up again tomorrow.

After Dad leaves, I'm going to resume my mapping project. I have a number of revisions and such to work on before I start posting again, including palette and hex art revisions, so it might be towards the end of the month that daily maps begin appearing again.

There are two bits of really good news, though. The first is that Dad has been photographing all of the maps for me, so I have now got source material to work from for the missing ESDs - most notably TM2 The Eastern Countries trail map, HWA2 and HWA3 (Ashmorain and Shajapur).

Secondly, Dad asked me to do an Orkney map for his upcoming book, essentially using the same mapping techniques I use for Mystara, minus the hexes of course. Since I agreed to do this for him, he bought me an early birthday present: a Wacom pen tablet. This could make my whole project much easier, although the learning curve seems a little steep so far.


I had forgotten about the Alphatian Neatharum map, thanks for reminding me. All of the rest of the maps you mentioned are on my list, except for a few which are already done. The order they will appear will be official followed by non-official, in somewhat random order. I'll get to them all eventually.

Gordon - thanks for your generous offer of lending me the Red Steel maps. I will e-mail you soon.

Congrats on the wedding Thorf!

I'll be looking forward to seeing Ashmorain and Shajapur. I don't think I've seen fan-made maps of those before.

If we can still make requests, how about one of the Sylvan Realm?

Håvard

Oh, and feel free to share the Orkney ones too. Would be interesting to see how your mapping looks without hexes...'

Edit: Oh and I can't seem to access the pics from your link....

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Håvard

"Castles in the air - they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build as well."
-Henrik Ibsen

My Stuff at the Vaults

My Blackmoor Website

Congrats Thorf! I hope you and your bride have a long and happy life together

__________________
In the year AC995, Traianus Decius Aureus- Praetorian Legate, Equites Laurifer, twice honored with Triumphs, bearer of the Corona Civica, Corona Muralis and Corona Obsidionalis -delivered the motherland from the Thyatian occupation and was raised to the purple by the Praetorian Guard and the Legions. Long may he reign with strength and wisdom.

I am actually getting ready to run that adventure in my campaign within the next month or so. I plan on re-creating that map with the new hexes, unless Thorf beats me to it. I might also do the map of the Alatian Islands from DotE. I make no promises, as I don't get to spend as much time working on my campaign as I would like.

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Obligatory non sequitur goes here.

On the subject of Alphatian Neatharum, it turns out that the map is a very simple edit of the 40 mile per hex Hollow World Northern Iciria map. The scale listed on the map in Wrath of the Immortals is wrong. All that needs to be added is one border, two labels and a town.

Since it turned out to be so easy to do, I threw it together right now.



Here are my notes for this map:

• Battle Fields – the battle fields shown on the Hollow World Set Northern Iciria map are not shown here.
• Manac River – at the bottom edge of the map, the Manac River should run off into the Malpheggi Swamp, but these small run-offs are not shown here.
• Mis-spellings and Typos – Lake Chinaloc (Lake Chitlaloc), Tenpocatlion (Tenpocatliotl), Teolihuatl (Teotihuatl)

I also made a complete map of Northern Iciria with Alphatian Neatharum marked in.

As for the Alatians, it depends on which map you were intending to do. The 72 mile per hex maps are currently at the bottom of my list, because I intend to create them using 8 and 24 mile per hex maps shrunk down. On the other hand, I was just working on the 24 mile per hex version seen on the Isle of Dawn map last night. The Isle of Dawn is one of the first maps I'll be posting when I start posting again in a few weeks.

Those of you who are particularly observant may also have noticed that the Alphatian Neatharum map previews my latest hex art revisions.

Beautiful map as always, Thorf!

Regarding the map symbols, I'm finding them a little difficult to discern (partly due to my bad eyes). On the hexes with darker backgrounds, such as deep forest and jungle, the overlaid symbol doesn't stand out very well. If I might make a suggestion, my recommendation would be to use a darker shade of grey for the symbol. Even the light woods symbol could use a little darkening, to my eye.

Gordon

BTW, I have a question that's been puzzling me for some time.

What is the difference between lands marked as "Clear, Farmland" (typically with a plain green hex) and "Grasslands, Steppes, Savannah, Veldt" (typically with a yellowish hex with little green marks)? Does "Clear" mean that the land has been worked in some way, either by clearing away previously-existing woods or farming existing grasslands (thus implying currently- or previously- inhabited land), whereas "Grassland" is unworked and naturally-occurring?

As an example, Wendar - which I understand to be a largely elven land - has a lot of "Clear" land. It seems strange to think that elves would remove trees to clear land or do any real farming. Any thoughts?

Gordon

I don't recall any "official" explanation of the difference between the two, but I have always thought that the main difference was due to climate and vegetation.

"Clear" would then be much more richer in grasses and small bushes and also be more visually green, except perhaps in the driest part of summer, of course.

"Grasslands" would be more like the savannah description, having sparse grasses (but often taller), being green only in the short wet season (winter or spring, depending on the climate), and with less precipitation overall the grass is usually a golden to brownish colour.

This is all just the way I've interpreted it, IMO, but I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination.

I'm looking forward to seeing it, Thorf! If I might make a suggestion, though, you should probably check out what Thibault has already done. His work could save you a lot of trouble, since he's already done some extensive mapping of the IoD.

Geoff

Thanks for the reply, Hugin! That makes more sense, I guess. The savannah would be drier, perhaps rougher/rockier open ground, and the grasslands more fertile and receive more rainfall.

Gordon

Excellent! Thanks for posting that. I never compared the Alphatian Neathar map to the Hollow World maps, so I completely missed the scale being so far off.

Actually, I was planning on doing a color version of the 24 mile hex black and white map from the DM's sourcebook in DotE, since some of the Alatians are missing on the Isle of Dawn color map of the same scale.

I only need Aegos, and I can always refer to the Isle of Dawn color map for that, but a color version with the Alatians in thier entirety would be nice (and more manageable than the fold-out map).

I'm running a few side adventures while the party travels from Selenica to Aegos, so I won't need the map for a couple of weeks at least. If you don't plan on doing them (the Alatians) before then, I might just go ahead and do them myself and share the results here (time permitting).

Gordon - I'm planning on doing another palette revision in the near future, based on the official palettes as taken from my recent photographs of the official maps. I'll try to take your comments on board then. I should point out, though, that the official maps were often just as subtle as the palette I have chosen.

Another possibility is that our monitors are not calibrated the same, which is something I have been worrying about for a while now...

Thanks Hugin for your explanation of plains and grasslands. I'm planning on doing descriptions like that of all the terrain types eventually, to go with the Legend for my maps. The keyword being "eventually"...

For now, a good source is the Glantri: Kingdom of Magic map, which gives nice short little descriptions for many terrain types.

Geoff - don't worry, I haven't forgotten about the work you, Thibault and others have been doing all these years. But as I have explained before, I want to exhaust the official sources before I start stealing from you guys' work. That way I can also get a very clear idea of what is official and what is not, and most importantly of where the official problem areas are.

But yes, when I eventually start on the Isle of Dawn at 8 miles per hex, I will definitely be referring to Thibault's map.

Katana One - oh, I had completely forgotten about the maps in the sourcebook. I was wondering if there were full maps of Ochalea, the Pearl Islands and the Alatians.

I finished the Isle of Dawn map last night, and now that I have the source map for the rest of the Alatians, it should be easy to finish off that too. I was planning on doing Alphatia next, but a nice easy map would give me a bit of a breather between the big ones, so I think I'll finish the Alatians.

(Incidentally, this is the second time someone has said they might do a map, only to find that it happens to be the area I'm currently working on. Strange...)

I won't be posting them for a week or two, though, because I want to get a nice backlog of maps made up before I resume daily postings.

I can't wait to see these maps of places east of the Known World!

I've done some mapping of several areas of the IoD at 8 mi/hex as well- a couple are available on the Twilight of the Dawn website- most are still rather incomplete ones that I plug away at when I find the time and interest to do so.

Of course, obviously a huge chunk of the western portion was done on the Eastern Countries Trail Map.



Not so strange- I have found on many occasions that I am working on some area/idea or another, only to find that Havard is also independently working on/thinking about the same thing at right around the same time. The most recent example, of course, is the Order of the Griffon, but I seem to recall several such parallel thought processes.

Then, too, is the time when I really sat down to work on the history of the Isle of Dawn, and found a lot of the ideas I had seemed very similar to ideas Mystaros had in his Isle of Dawn histories- which I had only skimmed through briefly, but was nonetheless left wondering if I'd come up with the ideas on my own or my subconscious had picked up on his ideas on the skim-through and simply recalled them when I got to working on it...

Okay, I didn't realize that you were so focussed on matching the official palettes. I tend to strictly look at these things from a usability and aesthetic standpoint. "Official" isn't any more important to me than "canon". (Yes, I'm that kind of heretic. )

Gordon

Sorry Andrew, I thought I had mentioned you in my previous post but somehow you must have gotten deleted! I'll definitely be referring to your Twilight of the Dawn work too - whenever I get to that point, of course. There is still a surprising amount of official stuff to get through first, and it seems that the less detailed areas hold even more problems and inconsistencies than the well known places.

I do see what you mean now about the Isle of Dawn part on the Norwold map being 36 miles per hex... But I haven't yet worked out how to solve the problem. There are large scale guides (72 mile per hex map, 48 mile per hex map, world map) to work from, so I want to see how well I can get them all to conform before I make any decisions.

It should be very interesting to compare whatever I come up with to the existing maps which deal with that problem.


hehe, well actually some of my upcoming work will show you exactly how dedicated I am to matching the official palettes. (I already gave a hint of it in my Wrath of the Immortals replica map. Basically, I want to further distinguish my two types of maps, replica and updated, by giving the replicas their official palettes.)

However, my own palette is only loosely based on the official palettes, as evidenced among other things by the shade of green I chose. Moreover, these things may all change in my upcoming palette revisions, as I want to aim for a flexible palette that works well on paper as well as on the screen.

In other words, thanks for the input.

In other news, I'm currently working on the Alatians, Ochalea and the Pearl Islands, using the black and white maps from Dawn of the Emperors to fill in the missing areas from the Isle of Dawn map from the same set. Mostly they are quite compatible, but I found an interesting note in Phase II of the Wrath of the Immortals adventure, saying that Aegos only has two settlements, Aegopoli and Selenion. Of course it goes on to mention the third one, Pittston, but the interesting thing is that this description is totally inconsistent with the Isle of Dawn map version of Aegos. That version does not include Selenion, even though the map in the Dawn of the Emperors source book does. But more than that, the poster map features four other villages with Thothian sounding names that are never referred to anywhere else.

The question now becomes what to do with the four extra villages. Aeria also has extra villages not referred to elsewhere, again with Thothian names. Given the proximity to Thothia, it seems reasonable that the Alatians could have been settled by Thothians at some point. The villages then retained their older placenames after the arrival of other settlers.

Alternatively, perhaps the islands were originally largely Thothian, and the clearances of the mid 700s replaced this population with a largely "common" Alphatian one.

I'm definitely leaning towards leaving the villages on the maps. But it's funny that Aaron Allston overlooked the situation on Aegos (in Wrath of the Immortals) when it was he who created it in the first place (in Dawn of the Emperors). It makes me think more than ever that the authors of the supplements were not wholly involved in the map-making process.